An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/29-0#.T6uD2MUjtPN.facebook

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies.
Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major
explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We
had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such
self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military
war.
The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At
issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into
something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and
prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that
private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend
on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of
Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater
stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still
early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers
because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be
up to you.
Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps
perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is
the essential game plan of the big money boys.
First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the
overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this
means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive.
Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and
inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any
training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can
get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently
so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career
out of it.
Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you
can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All
they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless
memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things
like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth,
ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s
too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent,
experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable
equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.
Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate
franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool
teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for
the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it
once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room
monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat
this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In
biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a
K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and
reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the
supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential
astronomical.
This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the
rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars
a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors
want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you
find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in
automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking,
telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing,
housing. Nowhere.
Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long
PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools,
and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the
sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter
goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.
But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but
profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell
it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made
Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13
TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s
and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony
monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his
foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you
thought it was his altruism.
Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who
is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote
repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction
of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from
an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the
mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two
decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual,
inquisitive, aspiring student.
That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a
cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money
mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to
produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are
agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddeningly difficult things to
create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the
process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass
the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized
educational systems.
If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force
undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful
predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code
in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in
poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in
poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are
on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is
faltering?
But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy,
painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the
market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the
banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and
the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.
This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically
supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public
services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private
hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned
his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s
public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s
unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works.
That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the
cause.
The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at
least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their
formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools,
by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public
schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than
2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!
If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you
go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed,
would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter
school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after
charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be
called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers,
special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the
public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.
The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at
least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to
be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s
futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers,
the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness
and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true
here, in education.
Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education,
boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and
just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince
the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about.
The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into
intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well,
that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?
Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to
say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they
need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m
getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be
incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And
the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most
powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the
schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.
So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy,
and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.

Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at a public high
school in northern California. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life,
a national non-profit that helps American schools build schools in the
developing world with donations of one dollar. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

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About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.